Adventures with Cecylee Part III ~ The Lockup
Lady Cecylee Neville, the protagonist of my first novel Thwarted Queen, was the youngest daughter of Ralph, Earl of Westmorland, and his second wife Joan de Beaufort. Earl Ralph was a shrewd operator. As a relatively young man, he became a protégé of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and so, when his first wife […]
THE BRIAR CLUB by Kate Quinn ~ A Book Review
If, like me, you go to Google Maps to find Briar and Wood streets in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington DC, you would be disappointed. For they do not exist. But it has to be said that the old neighborhood has undergone huge changes since the 1950s, when THE BRIAR CLUB is set. The […]
THE CRIME AT BLACK DUDLEY by Margery Allingham ~ A Book Review
THE CRIME AT BLACK DUDLEY is a typical Country House Cozy, where the house – with its hidden passages, cupboards that lead to priest holes, and sullen aura – becomes another character. And, like many talented whodunit writers, the person who actually committed the crime is the last person you would suspect. We arrive on […]
MORIARTY by Anthony Horowitz ~ A Book Review
MORIARY is a very different book than THE HOUSE OF SILK. Whereas THE HOUSE OF SILK focuses on Sherlock Holmes and his side-kick Dr. Watson, MORIARTY focuses on—well, on Moriarty. Except that he isn’t there, at least not until the very end. Obviously, with the title of Sherlock Holmes’ famous nemesis, Moriarty must be around […]
Among the Mad ~ Maisie Dobbs #6
What I love about Jacqueline Winspear’s novels is that she doesn’t just portray the froth and fun of the 1920s and 1930s. She also probes deeper into the lives of the men and women who inhabited those times to give us a full picture of what it was like to be alive then. I love […]
The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz ~ A Book Review
In THE HOUSE OF SILK, Anthony Horowitz writes a story that Conan Doyle could never have written, and has added all the details that Doyle left out of his original stories. Like most writers of his time, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was very comfortable writing about the aristocracy. He relished setting his most famous stories, […]
Murder in the Museum ~ Fethering #4 by Simon Brett
This volume is Number Four of Simon Brett’s alliterative murder mysteries set in the prosperous and benign-seeming county of West Sussex. Here, he takes us into the world of trustees ~ amateur volunteers ~ who are charged with running an estate, which in this novel consists of a country house and its grounds. Add to […]
The Torso in the Town ~ Fethering #3 by Simon Brett
In Volume 3 of the Fethering Mystery series, our two sleuths Carole Seddon (proper and rather puritanical) and her next-door neighbor Jude (not-so-proper and free-flowing) are at a dinner party in the nearby town with some incredibly snobbish people (this is set in the early 2000s) when they discover the mummified torso of a woman. […]
Adventures with Cecylee Part I ~ The Portrait
When I research my novels, I travel to the places where they are set to imbibe the scents, sights, and atmosphere of each place. I always find something I don’t expect. Take my first novel Thwarted Queen, which is a fictionalized autobiography told mostly in the voice of Lady Cecylee Neville, the youngest daughter of […]
The Body on the Beach ~ Fethering #1 by Simon Brett
When a British writer creates a murder mystery series with alliterative titles, it is clearly meant to be funny. And so, when I picked up THE BODY ON THE BEACH I believed it would be an entertaining…beach read. However, that is not quite true, for it turned out to be much more than that. It […]
